“Data needs to be unified for my executive use case” sounds like an org problem not a JIRA one. I’ve encountered it at companies that didn’t use JIRA at all

Depends on where you work I guess. In reality, reporting really has nothing to do with SWE state tracking. You can also just write a report in a letter and mail it to the board. It's not like they are going to log in to JIRA or even have an account or SSO-allowed credentials since they don't need to be there.

On the other hand, like almost copy-pasted here, if a top-down 'unification make it worse for everyone' effort is started, no vendor or tool is going to stop that and your work will get worse.

Spot on. One of the reasons we created Atlas (new product) was precisely this: help stakeholders and dependent teams focus on common language between teams over this misconception that task-level reporting is how they help understand the true state of work. Disclaimer: I work for Atlassian on Atlas, and I didn’t think I could ever get so passionate about soling this problem.

This happened to me!